Here's the results of MTV and AP's Survey on what makes the youth happy.
Poll: Family ties key to youth happiness
By JOCELYN NOVECK and TREVOR TOMPSON, Associated Press Writers Sun Aug 19, 5:48 PM ET
NEW YORK - So you're between the ages of 13 and 24. What makes you happy? A worried, weary parent might imagine the answer to sound something like this: Sex, drugs, a little rock 'n' roll. Maybe some cash, or at least the car keys.
Turns out the real answer is quite different. Spending time with family was the top answer to that open-ended question, according to an extensive survey — more than 100 questions asked of 1,280 people ages 13-24 — conducted by The Associated Press and MTV on the nature of happiness among America's young people.
Next was spending time with friends, followed by time with a significant other. And even better for parents: Nearly three-quarters of young people say their relationship with their parents makes them happy.
"They're my foundation," says Kristiana St. John, 17, a high-school student from Queens in New York. "My mom tells me that even if I do something stupid, she's still going to love me no matter what. Just knowing that makes me feel very happy and blessed."
Other results are more disconcerting. While most young people are happy overall with the way their lives are going, there are racial differences: the poll shows whites to be happier, across economic categories, than blacks and Hispanics. A lot of young people feel stress, particularly those from the middle class, and females more than males.
You might think money would be clearly tied to a general sense of happiness. But almost no one said "money" when asked what makes them happy, though people with the highest family incomes are generally happier with life. However, having highly educated parents is a stronger predictor of happiness than income.
And sex? Yes, we were getting to that. Being sexually active actually leads to less happiness among 13-17 year olds, according to the survey. If you're 18 to 24, sex might lead to more happiness in the moment, but not in general.
From the body to the soul: Close to half say religion and spirituality are very important. And more than half say they believe there is a higher power that has an influence over things that make them happy. Beyond religion, simply belonging to an organized religious group makes people happier.
And parents, here's some more for you: Most young people in school say it makes them happy. Overwhelmingly, young people think marriage would make them happy and want to be married some day. Most also want to have kids.
Finally, when asked to name their heroes, nearly half of respondents mentioned one or both of their parents. The winner, by a nose: Mom.
___
HAPPINESS IS ...
"...two kinds of ice cream," according to the song from "You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown." John Lennon, more darkly, described it as a warm gun. A much more typical description comes from Stacy Rosales, a 23-year-old recent college graduate, who calls it "just a general stress-free feeling where I'm not really worried about anything. THAT makes me happy."
For Chad Fiedler, 17, it's "just waking up in the morning and looking forward to what I'm going to be doing that day." And for Eoshe Roland, a 14 year old from Nashville, it's "playing trumpet in my school band."
However you express, define or feel it, 65 percent of those surveyed say they're happy with the way things are going for them right now.
WE ARE FAMILY:
When asked what one thing makes them most happy, 20 percent mentioned spending time with family — more than anything else. About three-quarters — 73 percent — said their relationship with their parents makes them happy. After family, it was relationships with friends that people mentioned most.
"It's good news to hear young people being realistic about what really makes them happy," says psychologist Jean Twenge, author of "Generation Me" and a professor at San Diego State University. "Research has shown us that relationships are the single greatest source of happiness."
Also confirming existing research, Twenge says, is the finding that children of divorced parents are somewhat less likely to be happy. Among 13-17 year olds, 64 percent of those with parents still together said they wake up happy, compared to 47 percent of those with divorced parents.
FIRST COMES LOVE, THEN COMES...:
Overall, romantic relationships are a source of happiness — but being in one doesn't necessarily lead to greater happiness with life in general.
"It would be nice, but where I am right now is, I want to take care of myself," says Rosales. "Before you can be in a committed relationship you have to know who you are and what you really want."
Eventually, though, marriage is a goal for most young people, with 92 percent saying they either definitely or probably want to get married.
"I don't want to be one of those career businesswomen who just doesn't ever settle down," says St. John, the New York high school student.
MONEY, MONEY, MONEY:
Money may make the world go around, but when asked what one thing makes them happiest, almost nobody in the poll mentioned money or anything material. Still, money does play a role in happiness.
Those who can't afford to buy many of the things they want are less happy with life in general. Just under half of young people think they'd be happier if they had more money, while the same percentage (49 percent) say they'd be just as happy.
"I'm going to college next year," says Fiedler, who will attend Drexel University in Philadelphia. "Not the cheapest thing nowadays. Money isn't the most important thing, but if something happens, it can turn into it."
STRESSES, FEARS:
Young people in this survey had a 10 percent higher stress rate than adults did in a 2006 AP-Ipsos poll. For ages 13 to 17, school is the greatest source of stress. For those in the 18-24 range, it's jobs and financial matters.
Only 29 percent feel very safe traveling, and 25 percent very safe from terror attacks. Still, those interviewed said the fear of terror interfered very little with their lives.
DRUGS AND ALCOHOL: Alcohol users are slightly less happy than those who don't drink. The differences are more remarkable among 13-17 year olds; just 40 percent of those who drank in the last seven days reported being happy with life, versus 68 percent of those who didn't. And 49 percent of illegal drug users reported being happy with life, compared with 66 percent of those who didn't use drugs.
RACIAL DIVIDE:
While 72 percent of whites say they're happy with life in general, just 56 percent of blacks and 51 percent of Hispanics say that. And 66 percent of whites were happy at the moment the interview began, compared with 57 percent of minorities.
SUSTENANCE FOR THE SOUL:
"I just like believing in something greater than me and everybody else," St. John, who attends a Catholic school, says of her commitment to religion. "When I pray, sometimes it just makes me feel better, if I'm freaking out about things."
Those for whom religion and spirituality plays a bigger role tend to be happier, according to the poll. More than half — 55 percent — say it is either a very important part of life or the single most important thing in their lives.
I NEED A HERO:
Oprah Winfrey? Michael Jordan? Hillary Clinton? Tiger Woods? All those names came up when people were asked about heroes. Of public figures, Martin Luther King, Jr. got the most mentions. But nearly half mentioned one of their parents, with mothers ranking higher (29 percent) than fathers (21 percent.)
"My parents came here from the Philippines in the '70s," says Rosales. "They raised a family and got to where they are from scratch. My mother's now the director of a hospital. I admire them both so much."
"My mother is a pastor, and she's my role model," says Esohe, the 14 year old in Nashville. "She's so giving." Blacks and Hispanics were more likely than whites to name their mothers.
Also mentioned: God (more than 10 percent), teachers (nearly 5 percent); and members of the military, policemen and firefighters.
THE CRYSTAL BALL:
Will young people grow up to be happy adults? Overall they're optimistic: Sixty-two percent think they'll be happier in the future than they are now. (Those over 18 are more optimistic.) But many anticipate a more difficult life than their parents had.
"I think a lot about my kids and what their lives are going to be like," says Fiedler. "There may be wars going on, who knows. I just have a feeling it's going to be harder for the future generation to be happy."
___
The AP-MTV poll was conducted by Knowledge Networks Inc. from April 16 to 23, and involved online interviews with 1,280 people aged 13 to 24. It had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.
AP News Survey Specialist Dennis Junius contributed to this report.
Saturday, November 10, 2007
Saturday, September 29, 2007
UNIV 2008 Research Seminar and the Upcoming Rural Service Project.
We recently had the research writing seminar for the participants of UNIV 2008 today, 5-6pm by Mrs. Alice Belen. We are currently finalizing research topics and looking at possible methodologies.
UNIV participants are also encourage to take part in this October's Rural Service Project (26th to 31st) as a venue for reaching out to those in need. Activities include construction of public toilets for the recepient community (sitio Ibo, Brgy. Pondol, Balamban), medical-dental services, health classes, livelihood seminar, catechism and tutorial classes. An excursion for the volunteers is also planned. Volunteers, and donations in cash or kind will be greatly appreciated. Feel free to contact the UNIV Local Coordinator for details (email: jaaraf@yahoo.com, cell no. 09176404305).
Sunday, September 2, 2007
Stay Tuned for Upcoming UNIV 2008 Activities!
After conducting the orientations for UNIV2008, we are currently conducting individual interviews for all the participants.
Other acitivies are the research writing seminar this month and the Rural Service Project in October. Do stay tuned for details on these up and coming activities!
Other acitivies are the research writing seminar this month and the Rural Service Project in October. Do stay tuned for details on these up and coming activities!
Friday, July 27, 2007
UNIV 2008 Orientation Schedules
The following dates have been set for the UNIV 2008 Orientation of various schools and universities in Cebu City:
- July 28 - University of the Visayas, Cebu Normal University, University of the Philippines-Visayas (Cebu College)[1st half]
- August 4- St. Theresa's College-Cebu, University of San Carlos, University of the Philippines-Visayas (Cebu College)[2nd half]
- August 11- University of San Jose-Recoletos, Southwestern University
- August 18- Center for International Education, Cebu Institute of Technology, University of Southern Philippines
Orientation is from 1:00pm-2:30pm. Orientation venue is Banilad Study Center. Site map is shown below.
Orientations for other interested female college students may also be arranged and scheduled with the UNIV Local Coordinator throughout the month of August. For inquiries, contact tel. nos. 2325326 or 2322390, mobile no. 09176404305, or email jaaraf@yahoo.com.
Sunday, July 22, 2007
Topic Leads
Below are some topics you may want to pursue for your UNIV research paper. The theme for UNIV 2008 is "Being, Appearing and Communicating: Entertainment and Happiness in a Multimedia Society".
Topic Leads
•Arts & MassComm:
–Reality TV: Providing True Happiness?
–Entertainment Trends and Cultural Development
•Technology & Science:
–Smile! You’re on Candid Blog! (A Philosophical Analysis of Blogging)
–Entertainment Technology in Aid of Wellness
•Business & Economics:
–The Business of Film & Television: Wealth in Place of True Joy?
–Great Leadership in the Entertainment Industry
–The Economics of the Media: Consumers’ Perspective
•Social Sciences & Philosophy:
–The True, the Good, the Beautiful, the Joyful: A Philosophical Analysis of Entertainment Media
–The Sociology of Entertainment: A Complete Stakeholder Analysis
–Pedagogy: Learning from ShowBiz
•Law & International Relations:
–Laws in Aid of Well-being
–Global Relations: Getting Some Help from the Entertainment World
Tuesday, July 17, 2007
More Articles on Happiness
Here are more articles on the UNIV theme, also taken from the print edition of The Economist.
Economics discovers its feelings
Dec 19th 2006 From The Economist (print edition)
Not quite as dismal as it was
ECONOMICS is “not a ‘gay science’,” wrote Thomas Carlyle in 1849. No, it is “a dreary, desolate, and indeed quite abject and distressing one; what we might call, by way of eminence, the dismal science.”
Carlyle was a fine one to talk. He was a brooding curmudgeon who thundered against industry, progress and the young science that sought to explain them. He found economists dismal not for the obvious reasons, such as their dry arithmetic or their gloomy preoccupation with scarcity and subsistence. Instead, he took against them because they were so wedded to the idea of happiness.
The economists of his day took their cue from Jeremy Bentham and his “utilitarian” philosophy. They calculated happiness, or utility, as the sum of good feelings minus bad, and argued that the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain were the sole springs of human action. One even looked forward to the invention of a hedonimeter, a “psychophysical machine” that would record the ups and downs of a man's feelings just as a thermometer might plot his temperature. Such people, Carlyle complained, fancied that man was a “dead Iron-Balance for weighing Pains and Pleasures on”.
The hedonimeter was never invented, and for a century or so economists fell silent about both weights on man's scales. They studied outward behaviour, not inward feelings; choices made, not pleasures taken. But in recent years, economists have become newly confident that they can measure utility as Bentham conceived it: as a quantum of pleasure or pain.
How do they do it? Mostly they just ask people. Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist at Princeton University who won the Nobel prize for economics in 2002, reckons people are not as mysterious as less nosy economists supposed. “The view that hedonic states cannot be measured because they are private events is widely held but incorrect,” he and his colleagues argue. Generally, people can say how they feel at a given moment, on a scale of zero to ten.
And if this smacks of hearsay not science, the new “hedonimetrists” can appeal to other kinds of evidence, better calculated to impress. They can look into people's eyes; or better still, their brains. People who confess to feeling happy also grin more than others. And they mean it: they smile with their eyes (a contraction of the orbicularis oculi facial muscles), not just their mouths. People's self-reports also tally roughly with what electrodes planted on their scalp reveal about the frequency and voltage of electrical waves in their left forebrain, which sparks up when they are feeling good.
Mr Kahneman's most notorious experiment took place in a Toronto hospital over a decade ago. He and a colleague asked patients undergoing a colonoscopy (in which a probe is passed up the rectum) to report their level of discomfort minute by minute. Later, they were asked how they felt about the procedure in retrospect. Their answers were surprising. The test left a worse impression on patient A, for whom it lasted less than ten minutes, than on patient B, who suffered for 24 minutes. Patients' recollections were heavily coloured by the procedure's worst moment and its last moment. The duration of the pain did not seem to make much difference. Patients were happier about a colonoscopy that lasted longer but ended better.
Fallible memories
Mr Kahneman, who is not shy of extrapolation, thinks people often choose to repeat experiences that seem better in retrospect than they did at the time. Contrary to Bentham, the “sovereign masters that determine what people will do are not pleasure and pain, but fallible memories of pleasure and pain.”
If people are bad at recalling their feelings, they are worse at predicting them. They fail to anticipate how a person feels after moving to a new city, losing a limb or winning a jackpot. Prisoners imagine that solitary confinement will be worse than it really is; mothers-to-be think the pain of childbirth will be more bearable than it typically proves to be. And it is not just unusual events that trip people up. According to Mr Kahneman, people struggle to predict how their appetite for ice-cream, low-fat yogurt or music might change in the course of a week of enjoying them. If man is an iron-balance that weigh pains and pleasures, the scales are sadly askew.
As a result, many economists now ignore one of the discipline's dreariest maxims: de gustibus non est disputandum, one does not quarrel over tastes. Robert Frank begins his 1999 book “Luxury Fever” with a long, incredulous description of the Viking-Frontgate Professional Grill, a barbecuer's folly, sporting infra-red rotisserie, rangetop burners and brass trimmings. Such purchases would once have gone unquestioned by economists. The consumer was king: if he spent $5,000 on a grill, a $5,000 grill must be what he wanted. Likewise, if he picked X over Y, a colonoscopy over an enema, pushpin over poetry, his choice should be respected. But now economists like Mr Frank and Mr Kahneman delight in second-guessing such choices, citing the evidence of their hedonimeters.
Have fun
What sumptuary advice do they offer? In general, the economic arbiters of taste recommend “experiences” over commodities, pastimes over knick-knacks, doing over having. Mr Frank thinks people should work shorter hours and commute shorter distances, even if that means living in smaller houses with cheaper grills. The appeal of such fripperies palls faster than people expect, they say. David Hume suggested that “the amusements, which are the most durable, have all a mixture of application and attention in them; such as gaming and hunting.”
But as with any argument involving economists, there is more than one side to it. For one thing, many experiences demand a substantial outlay on commodities: horses, hounds and jodhpurs, for example. And as Bryan Caplan, of George Mason University, points out, many trinkets and fripperies themselves provide a stream of experiences.
Adam Smith thought there was pleasure to be had simply in admiring the craftsmanship of a well-made watch, even if its extra accuracy was of little practical benefit. Bentham appreciated his creature comforts: according to Negley Harte, the University of London's historian, his embalmed body wears a pair of knitted underpants, unlike most of his contemporaries, who simply tucked their shirt-tails between their legs.
And before Mr Frank scoffs at Gillette's latest five-blade shaving system, he should recall Benjamin Franklin's belief that teaching a young man to shave, and keeping his blade sharp, would contribute more to his happiness than giving him 1,000 guineas to squander. The money would leave behind only regret. But self-grooming spares a man “the frequent vexation of waiting for barbers, and of their sometimes dirty fingers, offensive breaths, and dull razors.”
Richard Layard, an economist at the London School of Economics, provides one prominent example of the transformation that some dismal scientists have undergone. He made his mark with his 1991 treatise, “Unemployment”, co-authored with Stephen Nickell and Richard Jackman. On its cover, the book featured the painting “L'Absinthe” by Edgar Degas: a dejected woman and a dishevelled man, two “rather sodden” characters, as one reviewer put it at the time, pass the time and ease their sorrows with a tipple in a Paris café. The book was dedicated to the “millions who suffer through want of work”.
Today, Lord Layard argues, unemployment is no longer Britain's biggest social problem. The number of jobless Britons claiming the dole is now about 960,000. But there are over 1m people receiving incapacity benefits because depression and stress have left them unfit to work.
Lord Layard's latest book has a much jauntier image on its cover: a “happy eccentric” with a fez on his head, a monocle in his eye and a bunch of flowers in his hand. A perky character, one might say. Ambitious, policy-minded economists such as Lord Layard are no longer satisfied with raising the rate of employment. They want to lift the rate of enjoyment too.
That, it turns out, is not easy. Happiness, as measured by national surveys, has hardly changed over 50 years. The rich are generally happier than the poor, but rich countries do not get happier as they get richer. The Japanese are much better off now than in 1950, but the proportion who say they are “very happy” has not budged. Americans too have remained much as Alexis de Tocqueville found them in the 19th century: “So many lucky men, restless in the midst of abundance.”
Lord Layard and Mr Frank both blame habit and rivalry for this stagnation of morale. People grow accustomed to what they have—however much of it there is. Moreover, having a lot of things is not enough if other people have more. A rising tide lifts all boats, but not all spirits.
For economists, this is radical stuff. They traditionally argue that people best serve themselves and the public by minding their own business. Indeed, this laissez-faire attitude is one reason Carlyle attacked them. Economics, he wrote, “reduces the duty of human governors to that of letting men alone”. He was afraid this radical idea would “dissever and destroy most existing institutions of society”.
But Lord Layard argues that we cannot help minding other people's business, as well as our own. Doing well is not enough: we also want to do better than our peers. This status anxiety runs deep in our nature, he says. Vervet monkeys at the top of their social tree enjoy more mates and bananas as a result, but they also exult in their position for its own sake. As with monkeys, so with mandarins. Top British civil servants tend to live longer than their underlings, regardless of other differences in lifestyle, according to the “Whitehall II” studies which have been monitoring thousands of Humphreys and Bernards since the 1980s.
Doing well is not enough: we also want to do better than our peers. This status anxiety runs deep
To clamber up the pecking order, some people slave away nights and weekends at the office. They gain in rank at the expense of their free time. But in making that sacrifice they also hurt anyone else who shares their aspirations: they too must give up their weekends to keep up. Mr Frank reckons that many people would like to work less, if only others slackened off also. But such bargains cannot be struck unilaterally. On the contrary, people compete in costly “arms races”, knowing that if they do not work harder, they will lose their standing to someone who does.
These races are motivated by more than just prestige. As Fred Hirsch argued in his 1977 book, “The Social Limits to Growth”, many good things in life are “positional”. You can enjoy them only if others don't. Sometimes, a quick car, fine suit or attractive house is not enough. One must have the fastest car, finest suit or priciest house.
Think of the scramble for schools, Mr Frank says. Only 10% of kids can go to the top 10% of schools. In many countries, wherever the schools are good, the houses will be expensive. Thus parents who want the best education for their child must overwork to afford a house in a good school district. In doing so, however, they raise the bar for everyone else.
Is mutual disarmament possible? Not without government help, Mr Frank and Lord Layard argue. The exchequer should tax earned income heavily enough to deter one-upmanship, they say.
Despite appearances, this is not a naked example of punitive redistribution—the fiscal politics of envy. Mr Frank and Lord Layard do not want to level the social order. Their aim is much more conservative than that. Their taxes would leave the pecking order intact and envy undiminished. But people would be deterred from acting on the green-eyed monster. The problem these economists want to tackle is not inequality per se. It is that people don't know their place and scramble vainly to improve it. Carlyle, who thought man should content himself with being the worthy follower of worthy superiors, would no doubt have approved.
Go with the flow
Not that Carlyle was workshy. On the contrary, he thought that work was the only lasting measure of a man. As he put it, whatever insight, ingenuity and energy a man had in him “will lie written in the work he does”. And the “only happiness a brave man ever troubled himself with asking much about was, happiness enough to get his work done.”
Economics, on the whole, disagrees. It thinks of labour as a chore. People sell it, at the expense of their leisure time, purely as a means to the end of consumption. Indeed, Carlyle first anointed economics the “dismal science” because liberal economists insisted that American slaves be free to sell their labour in the marketplace like everyone else.
For many people, work is—as traditional economics assumes—just a way to pay the rent. But Carlyle is not the only one to see it as much more than that. In a string of experiments, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, of Claremont Graduate University, has handed out pagers to thousands of people who agreed to log their mood whenever prompted to do so. People were, unsurprisingly, at their happiest when eating, carousing or pottering around the garden. But some fortunate people also found deep satisfaction from losing themselves in their work: “forgetting themselves in a function”, as W.H. Auden put it.
It is easier to forget yourself in some functions than in others, of course. In Auden's poem, surgeons manage it “making a primary incision”, as do cooks, mixing their sauce, and clerks “completing a bill of lading”. This happy state, which Mr Csikszentmihalyi calls “flow”, arises most often in work that stretches a person without defeating him; work that provides “clear goals”, “unambiguous feedback” and a “sense of control”.
Where these things are lacking, people can sometimes sculpt their jobs to compensate. For example, Amy Wrzesniewski, of New York University, and her colleagues found hospital cleaners who would hold patients' hands and keep them company, brightening their day as well as scrubbing their rooms. Other researchers noted that hairdressers see themselves as more than just scissors for hire. They serve as emotional confidants for clients they like, and “fire” clients they don't.
Mr Csikszentmihalyi is now one of three scholars behind the “Good Work” project, which aims to make “flow” a more common experience in professional life. The project frets about how to square the “competing demands of excellence, ethics, and earnings”. In some fields of endeavour, such as genetic research, it found that good work was rewarded with professional success; but in others, professional pride and corporate profit seemed to tug in opposite directions. Journalism, apparently, is a “prototypically misaligned profession”, staffed by reporters who want to investigate great affairs of state but read by a public more interested in stories that are “scandalous, sensational, superficial”.
Some fortunate people also found deep satisfaction from losing themselves in their work
What to do? The Good Work project tends to blame the “market” for corrupting craftsmanship. But consumers cannot be made to want what producers care to make. Besides, “it is a thrill unique to a market society to find that people are willing to pay for one's product,” writes Deirdre McCloskey in her latest book, “The Bourgeois Virtues”. Payment is a form of applause; all the more convincing because it is costly. Furthermore, when you spend what you have earned in the market, you can enjoy knowing that you have “pulled your own weight”, taking from the national product no more than you have added to it.
If people are determined to pursue their calling rather than simply taking a job, some professions (surgery, cookery, genetics) may become overcrowded, others undersubscribed. But when a job cannot find enough takers, the market finds ways to ennoble it: first pay, and then status, begin to rise. It becomes economical to automate some aspects of the work, employing machines to do the deadening humdrum toil that men and women are no longer willing to put up with. What remains of the job will be the bits only people can do: tasks that require insight, ingenuity and the human touch. Ms McCloskey recalls the Cincinnati sewerman, interviewed a few years ago on National Public Radio, who earned $60,000 a year and liked to tell girls he was an “environmental” worker.
The dismal sage
Did Thomas Carlyle ever make his peace with the dismal science? Even his admirers admit that his “bigoted dislike of Political Economists withheld him from studying their works” or appreciating their advances. Nor did he soften much in his disdain for the fruits of commercial society: cheaper cotton and swifter railways meant nothing to him; and in his opinion, advertising, or “puffing” as he called it, deserved to be taxed out of existence.
But as any economist could have pointed out, he had a lot to thank commercial society for. Having discovered his vocation as a cultural muckraker, he eventually secured an audience, a market and even the offer (which was refused) of Westminster Abbey as a final resting place. In periods of speedy progress, it seems, stubborn reactionaries at least enjoy a certain scarcity value.
SIR – Regarding your article on happiness, economists should never have been smitten with the epithet of “dismal” given to their field of study (“Economics discovers its feelings”, December 23rd). But nor should they have become embroiled in debating what constitutes happiness and how it can be measured. The subject is more appropriately the purview of philosophers, psychologists and sociologists. The aim of economists is to find the best ways to engender wealth so that more people can choose for themselves the optimum use of their time. That may be more time in the garden or working longer hours. The choice, and the reasons behind that choice, are a matter of individual preference.
Kean Seager
Bristol
Economics discovers its feelings
Dec 19th 2006 From The Economist (print edition)
Not quite as dismal as it was
ECONOMICS is “not a ‘gay science’,” wrote Thomas Carlyle in 1849. No, it is “a dreary, desolate, and indeed quite abject and distressing one; what we might call, by way of eminence, the dismal science.”
Carlyle was a fine one to talk. He was a brooding curmudgeon who thundered against industry, progress and the young science that sought to explain them. He found economists dismal not for the obvious reasons, such as their dry arithmetic or their gloomy preoccupation with scarcity and subsistence. Instead, he took against them because they were so wedded to the idea of happiness.
The economists of his day took their cue from Jeremy Bentham and his “utilitarian” philosophy. They calculated happiness, or utility, as the sum of good feelings minus bad, and argued that the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain were the sole springs of human action. One even looked forward to the invention of a hedonimeter, a “psychophysical machine” that would record the ups and downs of a man's feelings just as a thermometer might plot his temperature. Such people, Carlyle complained, fancied that man was a “dead Iron-Balance for weighing Pains and Pleasures on”.
The hedonimeter was never invented, and for a century or so economists fell silent about both weights on man's scales. They studied outward behaviour, not inward feelings; choices made, not pleasures taken. But in recent years, economists have become newly confident that they can measure utility as Bentham conceived it: as a quantum of pleasure or pain.
How do they do it? Mostly they just ask people. Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist at Princeton University who won the Nobel prize for economics in 2002, reckons people are not as mysterious as less nosy economists supposed. “The view that hedonic states cannot be measured because they are private events is widely held but incorrect,” he and his colleagues argue. Generally, people can say how they feel at a given moment, on a scale of zero to ten.
And if this smacks of hearsay not science, the new “hedonimetrists” can appeal to other kinds of evidence, better calculated to impress. They can look into people's eyes; or better still, their brains. People who confess to feeling happy also grin more than others. And they mean it: they smile with their eyes (a contraction of the orbicularis oculi facial muscles), not just their mouths. People's self-reports also tally roughly with what electrodes planted on their scalp reveal about the frequency and voltage of electrical waves in their left forebrain, which sparks up when they are feeling good.
Mr Kahneman's most notorious experiment took place in a Toronto hospital over a decade ago. He and a colleague asked patients undergoing a colonoscopy (in which a probe is passed up the rectum) to report their level of discomfort minute by minute. Later, they were asked how they felt about the procedure in retrospect. Their answers were surprising. The test left a worse impression on patient A, for whom it lasted less than ten minutes, than on patient B, who suffered for 24 minutes. Patients' recollections were heavily coloured by the procedure's worst moment and its last moment. The duration of the pain did not seem to make much difference. Patients were happier about a colonoscopy that lasted longer but ended better.
Fallible memories
Mr Kahneman, who is not shy of extrapolation, thinks people often choose to repeat experiences that seem better in retrospect than they did at the time. Contrary to Bentham, the “sovereign masters that determine what people will do are not pleasure and pain, but fallible memories of pleasure and pain.”
If people are bad at recalling their feelings, they are worse at predicting them. They fail to anticipate how a person feels after moving to a new city, losing a limb or winning a jackpot. Prisoners imagine that solitary confinement will be worse than it really is; mothers-to-be think the pain of childbirth will be more bearable than it typically proves to be. And it is not just unusual events that trip people up. According to Mr Kahneman, people struggle to predict how their appetite for ice-cream, low-fat yogurt or music might change in the course of a week of enjoying them. If man is an iron-balance that weigh pains and pleasures, the scales are sadly askew.
As a result, many economists now ignore one of the discipline's dreariest maxims: de gustibus non est disputandum, one does not quarrel over tastes. Robert Frank begins his 1999 book “Luxury Fever” with a long, incredulous description of the Viking-Frontgate Professional Grill, a barbecuer's folly, sporting infra-red rotisserie, rangetop burners and brass trimmings. Such purchases would once have gone unquestioned by economists. The consumer was king: if he spent $5,000 on a grill, a $5,000 grill must be what he wanted. Likewise, if he picked X over Y, a colonoscopy over an enema, pushpin over poetry, his choice should be respected. But now economists like Mr Frank and Mr Kahneman delight in second-guessing such choices, citing the evidence of their hedonimeters.
Have fun
What sumptuary advice do they offer? In general, the economic arbiters of taste recommend “experiences” over commodities, pastimes over knick-knacks, doing over having. Mr Frank thinks people should work shorter hours and commute shorter distances, even if that means living in smaller houses with cheaper grills. The appeal of such fripperies palls faster than people expect, they say. David Hume suggested that “the amusements, which are the most durable, have all a mixture of application and attention in them; such as gaming and hunting.”
But as with any argument involving economists, there is more than one side to it. For one thing, many experiences demand a substantial outlay on commodities: horses, hounds and jodhpurs, for example. And as Bryan Caplan, of George Mason University, points out, many trinkets and fripperies themselves provide a stream of experiences.
Adam Smith thought there was pleasure to be had simply in admiring the craftsmanship of a well-made watch, even if its extra accuracy was of little practical benefit. Bentham appreciated his creature comforts: according to Negley Harte, the University of London's historian, his embalmed body wears a pair of knitted underpants, unlike most of his contemporaries, who simply tucked their shirt-tails between their legs.
And before Mr Frank scoffs at Gillette's latest five-blade shaving system, he should recall Benjamin Franklin's belief that teaching a young man to shave, and keeping his blade sharp, would contribute more to his happiness than giving him 1,000 guineas to squander. The money would leave behind only regret. But self-grooming spares a man “the frequent vexation of waiting for barbers, and of their sometimes dirty fingers, offensive breaths, and dull razors.”
Richard Layard, an economist at the London School of Economics, provides one prominent example of the transformation that some dismal scientists have undergone. He made his mark with his 1991 treatise, “Unemployment”, co-authored with Stephen Nickell and Richard Jackman. On its cover, the book featured the painting “L'Absinthe” by Edgar Degas: a dejected woman and a dishevelled man, two “rather sodden” characters, as one reviewer put it at the time, pass the time and ease their sorrows with a tipple in a Paris café. The book was dedicated to the “millions who suffer through want of work”.
Today, Lord Layard argues, unemployment is no longer Britain's biggest social problem. The number of jobless Britons claiming the dole is now about 960,000. But there are over 1m people receiving incapacity benefits because depression and stress have left them unfit to work.
Lord Layard's latest book has a much jauntier image on its cover: a “happy eccentric” with a fez on his head, a monocle in his eye and a bunch of flowers in his hand. A perky character, one might say. Ambitious, policy-minded economists such as Lord Layard are no longer satisfied with raising the rate of employment. They want to lift the rate of enjoyment too.
That, it turns out, is not easy. Happiness, as measured by national surveys, has hardly changed over 50 years. The rich are generally happier than the poor, but rich countries do not get happier as they get richer. The Japanese are much better off now than in 1950, but the proportion who say they are “very happy” has not budged. Americans too have remained much as Alexis de Tocqueville found them in the 19th century: “So many lucky men, restless in the midst of abundance.”
Lord Layard and Mr Frank both blame habit and rivalry for this stagnation of morale. People grow accustomed to what they have—however much of it there is. Moreover, having a lot of things is not enough if other people have more. A rising tide lifts all boats, but not all spirits.
For economists, this is radical stuff. They traditionally argue that people best serve themselves and the public by minding their own business. Indeed, this laissez-faire attitude is one reason Carlyle attacked them. Economics, he wrote, “reduces the duty of human governors to that of letting men alone”. He was afraid this radical idea would “dissever and destroy most existing institutions of society”.
But Lord Layard argues that we cannot help minding other people's business, as well as our own. Doing well is not enough: we also want to do better than our peers. This status anxiety runs deep in our nature, he says. Vervet monkeys at the top of their social tree enjoy more mates and bananas as a result, but they also exult in their position for its own sake. As with monkeys, so with mandarins. Top British civil servants tend to live longer than their underlings, regardless of other differences in lifestyle, according to the “Whitehall II” studies which have been monitoring thousands of Humphreys and Bernards since the 1980s.
Doing well is not enough: we also want to do better than our peers. This status anxiety runs deep
To clamber up the pecking order, some people slave away nights and weekends at the office. They gain in rank at the expense of their free time. But in making that sacrifice they also hurt anyone else who shares their aspirations: they too must give up their weekends to keep up. Mr Frank reckons that many people would like to work less, if only others slackened off also. But such bargains cannot be struck unilaterally. On the contrary, people compete in costly “arms races”, knowing that if they do not work harder, they will lose their standing to someone who does.
These races are motivated by more than just prestige. As Fred Hirsch argued in his 1977 book, “The Social Limits to Growth”, many good things in life are “positional”. You can enjoy them only if others don't. Sometimes, a quick car, fine suit or attractive house is not enough. One must have the fastest car, finest suit or priciest house.
Think of the scramble for schools, Mr Frank says. Only 10% of kids can go to the top 10% of schools. In many countries, wherever the schools are good, the houses will be expensive. Thus parents who want the best education for their child must overwork to afford a house in a good school district. In doing so, however, they raise the bar for everyone else.
Is mutual disarmament possible? Not without government help, Mr Frank and Lord Layard argue. The exchequer should tax earned income heavily enough to deter one-upmanship, they say.
Despite appearances, this is not a naked example of punitive redistribution—the fiscal politics of envy. Mr Frank and Lord Layard do not want to level the social order. Their aim is much more conservative than that. Their taxes would leave the pecking order intact and envy undiminished. But people would be deterred from acting on the green-eyed monster. The problem these economists want to tackle is not inequality per se. It is that people don't know their place and scramble vainly to improve it. Carlyle, who thought man should content himself with being the worthy follower of worthy superiors, would no doubt have approved.
Go with the flow
Not that Carlyle was workshy. On the contrary, he thought that work was the only lasting measure of a man. As he put it, whatever insight, ingenuity and energy a man had in him “will lie written in the work he does”. And the “only happiness a brave man ever troubled himself with asking much about was, happiness enough to get his work done.”
Economics, on the whole, disagrees. It thinks of labour as a chore. People sell it, at the expense of their leisure time, purely as a means to the end of consumption. Indeed, Carlyle first anointed economics the “dismal science” because liberal economists insisted that American slaves be free to sell their labour in the marketplace like everyone else.
For many people, work is—as traditional economics assumes—just a way to pay the rent. But Carlyle is not the only one to see it as much more than that. In a string of experiments, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, of Claremont Graduate University, has handed out pagers to thousands of people who agreed to log their mood whenever prompted to do so. People were, unsurprisingly, at their happiest when eating, carousing or pottering around the garden. But some fortunate people also found deep satisfaction from losing themselves in their work: “forgetting themselves in a function”, as W.H. Auden put it.
It is easier to forget yourself in some functions than in others, of course. In Auden's poem, surgeons manage it “making a primary incision”, as do cooks, mixing their sauce, and clerks “completing a bill of lading”. This happy state, which Mr Csikszentmihalyi calls “flow”, arises most often in work that stretches a person without defeating him; work that provides “clear goals”, “unambiguous feedback” and a “sense of control”.
Where these things are lacking, people can sometimes sculpt their jobs to compensate. For example, Amy Wrzesniewski, of New York University, and her colleagues found hospital cleaners who would hold patients' hands and keep them company, brightening their day as well as scrubbing their rooms. Other researchers noted that hairdressers see themselves as more than just scissors for hire. They serve as emotional confidants for clients they like, and “fire” clients they don't.
Mr Csikszentmihalyi is now one of three scholars behind the “Good Work” project, which aims to make “flow” a more common experience in professional life. The project frets about how to square the “competing demands of excellence, ethics, and earnings”. In some fields of endeavour, such as genetic research, it found that good work was rewarded with professional success; but in others, professional pride and corporate profit seemed to tug in opposite directions. Journalism, apparently, is a “prototypically misaligned profession”, staffed by reporters who want to investigate great affairs of state but read by a public more interested in stories that are “scandalous, sensational, superficial”.
Some fortunate people also found deep satisfaction from losing themselves in their work
What to do? The Good Work project tends to blame the “market” for corrupting craftsmanship. But consumers cannot be made to want what producers care to make. Besides, “it is a thrill unique to a market society to find that people are willing to pay for one's product,” writes Deirdre McCloskey in her latest book, “The Bourgeois Virtues”. Payment is a form of applause; all the more convincing because it is costly. Furthermore, when you spend what you have earned in the market, you can enjoy knowing that you have “pulled your own weight”, taking from the national product no more than you have added to it.
If people are determined to pursue their calling rather than simply taking a job, some professions (surgery, cookery, genetics) may become overcrowded, others undersubscribed. But when a job cannot find enough takers, the market finds ways to ennoble it: first pay, and then status, begin to rise. It becomes economical to automate some aspects of the work, employing machines to do the deadening humdrum toil that men and women are no longer willing to put up with. What remains of the job will be the bits only people can do: tasks that require insight, ingenuity and the human touch. Ms McCloskey recalls the Cincinnati sewerman, interviewed a few years ago on National Public Radio, who earned $60,000 a year and liked to tell girls he was an “environmental” worker.
The dismal sage
Did Thomas Carlyle ever make his peace with the dismal science? Even his admirers admit that his “bigoted dislike of Political Economists withheld him from studying their works” or appreciating their advances. Nor did he soften much in his disdain for the fruits of commercial society: cheaper cotton and swifter railways meant nothing to him; and in his opinion, advertising, or “puffing” as he called it, deserved to be taxed out of existence.
But as any economist could have pointed out, he had a lot to thank commercial society for. Having discovered his vocation as a cultural muckraker, he eventually secured an audience, a market and even the offer (which was refused) of Westminster Abbey as a final resting place. In periods of speedy progress, it seems, stubborn reactionaries at least enjoy a certain scarcity value.
~o~o~o~o~o~o~o~o~
Humbug
SIR – Regarding your article on happiness, economists should never have been smitten with the epithet of “dismal” given to their field of study (“Economics discovers its feelings”, December 23rd). But nor should they have become embroiled in debating what constitutes happiness and how it can be measured. The subject is more appropriately the purview of philosophers, psychologists and sociologists. The aim of economists is to find the best ways to engender wealth so that more people can choose for themselves the optimum use of their time. That may be more time in the garden or working longer hours. The choice, and the reasons behind that choice, are a matter of individual preference.
Kean Seager
Bristol
SIR – My research shows that countries with a higher economic and social quality of life have a higher suicide-rate. It may be that, as capitalism makes us wealthier and we can buy what we desire, we can no longer blame an external situation for our misery and are forced to realise that our unhappiness has its source in our own minds.
David Lester
Blackwood, New Jersey
David Lester
Blackwood, New Jersey
Monday, July 16, 2007
UNIV 2008: Being, Appearing and Communicating: Entertainment and Happiness in a Multimedia Society
The theme of UNIV 2008 is "Being, Appearing and Communicating: Entertainment and Happiness in a Multimedia Society".
Below is an article related to this year's theme:
Below is an article related to this year's theme:
Happiness (and how to measure it)
Dec 19th 2006 From The Economist (print edition)
Capitalism can make a society rich and keep it free. Don't ask it to make you happy as well?
HAVING grown at an annual rate of 3.2% per head since 2000, the world economy is over half way towards notching up its best decade ever. If it keeps going at this clip, it will beat both the supposedly idyllic 1950s and the 1960s. Market capitalism, the engine that runs most of the world economy, seems to be doing its job well.
But is it? Once upon a time, that job was generally agreed to be to make people better off. Nowadays that's not so clear. A number of economists, in search of big problems to solve, and politicians, looking for bold promises to make, think that it ought to be doing something else: making people happy.
The view that economics should be about more than money is widely held in continental Europe. In debates with Anglo-American capitalists, wily bons vivants have tended to cite the idea of “quality of life” to excuse slower economic growth. But now David Cameron, the latest leader of Britain's once rather materialistic Conservative Party, has espoused the notion of “general well-being” (GWB) as an alternative to the more traditional GDP. In America, meanwhile, inequality, over-work and other hidden costs of prosperity were much discussed in the mid-term elections; and “wellness” (as opposed to health) has become a huge industry, catering especially to the prosperous discontent of the baby-boomers.
The things you never knew you wanted
Much of this draws on the upstart science of happiness, which mixes psychology with economics (see article). Its adherents start with copious survey data, such as those derived from the simple, folksy question put to thousands of Americans every year or two since 1972: “Taken all together, how would you say things are these days—would you say that you are very happy, pretty happy or not too happy?” Some of the results are unsurprising: the rich report being happier than do the poor. But a paradox emerges that requires explanation: affluent countries have not got much happier as they have grown richer. From America to Japan, figures for well-being have barely budged.
The science of happiness offers two explanations for the paradox. Capitalism, it notes, is adept at turning luxuries into necessities—bringing to the masses what the elites have always enjoyed. But the flip side of this genius is that people come to take for granted things they once coveted from afar. Frills they never thought they could have become essentials that they cannot do without. People are stuck on a treadmill: as they achieve a better standard of living, they become inured to its pleasures.
Capitalism's ability to take things downmarket also has its limits. Many of the things people most prize—such as the top jobs, the best education, or an exclusive home address—are luxuries by necessity. An elite schooling, for example, ceases to be so if it is provided to everyone. These “positional goods”, as they are called, are in fixed supply: you can enjoy them only if others do not. The amount of money and effort required to grab them depends on how much your rivals are putting in.
Some economists think the results cast doubt on the long-held verities of their discipline. The dismal science traditionally assumes that people know their own interests, and are best left to mind their own business. How much they work, and what they buy, is their own affair. A properly brought-up economist seeks to explain their decisions, not to quarrel with them. But the new happiness gurus are much less willing to defer to people's choices.
Take work, for instance. In 1930 John Maynard Keynes imagined that richer societies would become more leisured ones, liberated from toil to enjoy the finer things in life. Yet most people still put in a decent shift. They work hard to afford things they think will make them happy, only to discover the fruits of their labour sour quickly. They also aspire to a higher place in society's pecking order, but in so doing force others in the rat race to run faster to keep up. So everyone loses.
Yet it is not self-evident that less work would mean more happiness. In America, when the working week has shortened, the gap has been filled by assiduous TV-watching. As for well-being, other studies show that elderly people who stop working tend to die sooner than their peers who labour on. Indeed, another side of happiness economics busies itself studying the non-monetary rewards from work: most people enjoy parts of their work, and some people love it.
As for capitalism's wasteful materialism, even Adam Smith had a problem with it. “How many people ruin themselves by laying out money on trinkets of frivolous utility?” he complained. It is hard to claim that pyramid-shaped tea-bags (developed at great expense over four years) have added much to the sum of human happiness. Yet if capitalism sometimes persuades people to buy stuff they only imagine they want, it also appeals to tastes and aptitudes they never knew they had. In the arts, this is called “originality” and is venerated. In commerce it is called “novelty” and too often dismissed. But without the urge for material improvement, people would still be wearing woollen underwear and holidaying in Bognor rather than Bhutan. Would that be so great?
The joys of niche capitalism
If growth of this kind does not make people happy, stagnation will hardly do the trick. Ossified societies guard positional goods more, not less, jealously. A flourishing economy, on the other hand, creates what biologists call “a tangled bank” of niches, with no clear hierarchy between them. Tyler Cowen, of George Mason University, points out that America has more than 3,000 halls of fame, honouring everyone from rock stars and sportsmen to dog mushers, pickle-packers and accountants. In such a society, everyone can hope to come top of his particular monkey troop, even as the people he looks down on count themselves top of a subtly different troop.
To find the market system wanting because it does not bring joy as well as growth is to place too heavy a burden on it. Capitalism can make you well off. And it also leaves you free to be as unhappy as you choose. To ask any more of it would be asking too much.
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